Roger Wilkes - Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

The Mammoth Book of

Also available

The Mammoth Book of 20th Century Science Fiction

The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy

The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 3

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 14

The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 16

The Mammoth Book of British Kings & Queens

The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends

The Mammoth Book of Fighter Pilots

The Mammoth Book of Future Cops

The Mammoth Book of Great Detective Stories

The Mammoth Book of Great Inventions

The Mammoth Book of Hearts of Oak

The Mammoth Book of Heroes

The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits

The Mammoth Book of How It Happened

The Mammoth Book of How It Happened: America

The Mammoth Book of How It Happened: Ancient Egypt

The Mammoth Book of How It Happened: Ancient Rome

The Mammoth Book of How It Happened: Battles

The Mammoth Book of How It Happened: In Britain

The Mammoth Book of How It Happened: Everest

The Mammoth Book of How It Happened: Naval Battles

The Mammoth Book of How It Happened: WWI

The Mammoth Book of How It Happened: World War II

The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper

The Mammoth Book of Maneaters

The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters

The Mammoth Book of Native Americans

The Mammoth Book of New Terror

The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories

The Mammoth Book of Prophecies

The Mammoth Book of Pulp Action

The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits

The Mammoth Book of SAS & Elite Forces

The Mammoth Book of Science Fiction Century Volume 1

The Mammoth Book of Seriously Comic Fantasy

The Mammoth Book of Sex, Drugs & Rock n Roll

The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers Tales

The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

The Mammoth Book of Special Forces

The Mammoth Book of Storms & Sea Disasters

The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels

The Mammoth Book of Sword and Honour

The Mammoth Book of The Edge

The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places

The Mammoth Book of True War Stories

The Mammoth Book of UFOs

The Mammoth Book of Vampires

The Mammoth Book of War Correspondents

The Mammoth Book of Women Who Kill

The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters

The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction

The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 1999

This revised edition published by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2005

Collection copyright Roger Wilkers 1999, 2005

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that is shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1-84529-149-2
eISBN: 978-1-78033-373-1

Printed and bound in the EU

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Roger Wilkes

(Rachel Nickell, 1992)
Brian Masters

(Jake Lingle, 1930)
Kenneth Allsop

(Janet Brown, 1995)
David James Smith

(Mary Rogers, 1841)
Irving Wallace

(Julia Wallace, 1931)
F. Tennyson Jesse

(Sacco and Vanzetti, 1920)
Louis Stark

(Fred Oesterreich, 1922)
Alan Hynd

(Hubert Chevis, 1931)
C.J.S. Thompson

(James Maybrick, 1889)
Maurice Moiseiwitsch

(Elizabeth Short, 1947)
Russell Miller

(Bob Crane, 1978)
John Austin

(Edwin Bartlett, 1875)
Christianna Brand

(Mrs Morrell and Mrs Hullett, 1957)
Eric Ambler

(Rev. Hall and Mrs Mills, 1922)
James Thurber

(Martin Guerre, 1560)
Elliott ODonnell

(Annie Hearn, 1930)
Daniel Farson

(Sir Harry Oakes, 1943)
Julian Symons

(Nan Patterson, 1904)
Alexander Woollcott

(Brighton Trunk Murder, 1934)
Jonathan Goodman

(William Burke Kirwan, 1852)
William Roughead

(William Desmond Taylor, 1922)
Erle Stanley Gardner

(Marilyn Monroe, 1962)
Kirk Wilson

(William Gardiner, 1902)
Jack Smith-Hughes

(Jessie Costello, 1933)
Sydney Horler

(The Whitechapel Murders, 1888)
Philip Sugden

(Margery Wren, 1930)
Douglas G. Browne and E.V. Tullett

(Zodiac Killings, 1968)
Colin Wilson

(Florence Bravo, 1876)
Dorothy Dunbar

(Shergar, 1983)
John Edwards

(Andrew and Abby Borden, 1892)
Angela Carter

(Robert Wood, 1907)
Nina Warner Hooke and Gil Thomas

(Arnold Rothstein, 1929)
Damon Runyon

(Bella Wright, 1919)
Edmund Pearson

(Starr Faithfull, 1931)
Morris Markey

(Stanley Setty, 1949)
Rebecca West

(Various Victims, 19645)
John du Rose

Twenty-five years ago, I disturbed the bones of an old murder case. It was unsolved; a man had been convicted but then freed on appeal, and no one else had subsequently been brought to book. Back in 1931, the hot-from-the-hob headlines had blazed the tale. An insurance agent called Wallace had murdered his drab little wife, beating out her brains in their blood-boltered front parlour in Liverpool with such unclerkly ferocity that the walls were streaked, spattered and flecked as high as the picture rail. Wallace was accused of having devised an alibi of consummate cunning, involving the critical synchromesh of logged telephone calls, word-of-mouth messages, at least three tram timetables and a bogus appointment. Picking it over for a radio programme half a century later, a panel of experts agreed that Wallace did not murder his wifeindeed, could not have done so. Moreover, newly uncovered testimony suggested a different solution and buttressed the case against a different suspect, a much younger man who boasted secret CID connections, a propensity to steal and to dissemble, and who nursed a grudge against Wallace. Yet amid the excitement of discovery, we discerned an unexpected note of melancholy. It now seemed a shame to spoil a perfectly good whodunnit. We had, in a sense, performed the reverse of alchemy and transmuted the burnished gold of mystery into dross. Solving the riddle had diminished the story, reduced it to a commonplace. Everyone loves a good murder, but especially a murder that defies solution, that continues to frustrate and ultimately defeat our forensic skills and the constructs of logic. Wed rather our unsolved crimes remain unsolved. What draws us is the magnetic field of mystery.

For more than three hundred years, readers of crime fiction have accorded with the seventeenth-century writer and physician Sir Thomas Browne. I love to lose myself in a mystery, declared this strange and curious sage in one of his few homespun moments. But his enthusiasm was characteristically prognostiche had identified a trend that was only to achieve its full flowering a full three centuries later during the Golden Age of the detective novel. The English poet W. H. Auden (19071973) was a self-confessed addict, but viewed the popularity of the whodunnit as a substitute for religious patterns of certainty, the dialectic of innocence and guilt. Auden was anxious to dignify the genre. He described the noir tales of the American Raymond Chandler, a writer of the hard-boiled school, as serious studies of a criminal milieu , to be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art. And yet, detective fiction is imprisoned within a basic formula. It is a ritual, as Auden himself reminds us: a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies.